mel: Nice to see things moving along but some immediate thoughts:
1. I'm no fan of splash mages but having one that weighs in at c. 180 kb doesn't strike me as a good idea. If you are going to have one at all (and with a c. 280kb main page it might be a good idea) then keep it small.
2. You might also want to check it in Opera as the central Flash animation overlaps the text making it unreadable. I think this is something to do with Opera not providing very good support for transparent backgrounds for things like Flash movies (anyone know anymore?). This might also be one of the reasons why it breaks elsewhere too.
3. I think a lot of my previous comments apply - the main Flash animation breaks badly in Opera, the content windows are too small, I don't like the scrollers, etc.
4. That yellow is really harsh - you're colours are really good (lots of nice blues) and that yellow just spoils the whole mood and then sort of disappears leaving only a thin line down the side (which looks out of place). The antialiasing on the graphics also looks bad when it 'switches' to the blue mid download - there is a yellow halo around them.
5. That text about you being in college just looks out of place (in any browser I tested it in).
6. The navigation hover thingy works OK in Op6 and IE6 but I just don't think the concept works.
Overall I really like the blues you use and the look of the interface is OK but issues like the yellow, small windows, the navigation, etc. detract from the feel (with something like this you want people to be drawn into the design and there are too many jarring elements for me, anyway, to feel comfortable). You will have to find a way to deal with the crossbrowser issues you are getting as well.
I think the general idea for the portfolio is OK and something you should pursue (I'd really like to see it working to its full potential) but you really need to think about the implementation and make things smoother, simpler and more immersive (easy things for me to say but very tricky to get right). Keep fiddling with the design and popping versions in here for feedback and I can see something very nice indeed emerging from this.
Emps
posted 03-25-2002 00:58
